Humanities: July 2008 Archive Page

A good feature from the New York Times:

Young people "aren't as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn't go in a line," said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. "That's a good thing because the world doesn't go in a line, and the world isn't organized into separate compartments or chapters."

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

[..]

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted "Dieing Isn't Always Bad," about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college," she said. -- Motoko Rich

Where to begin? Where to end? Lots of food for thought.

Galatea excites admiration, interest, even a certain amount of awe, and all of it richly deserved.  However, it seems to excite very little love.  Nor does it seem to inspire its player to grapple with anything more universal than the design of good IF conversation systems.

Is this a problem?  Not really, I think, when taken in isolation.  I think that Emily Short, whom I have immense respect for as a writer, creator, and tireless agent for positive change in IF, intended her work as an experiment and even possibly a bit of a provocation, an illustration of what might be possible.  But where is the game that takes Galatea's formal and technical innovations and uses them in the service of crackerjack story with a fascinating setting and compelling, believable characters?  Eric Eve's recent works come close, but how many others do?  Galatea sits out there in splendid isolation.  People play it, they tell themselves and each other how interesting it was, what potential for IF it demonstrates, and then they move on.  It's not up to Emily to build on Galatea's foundation; if she retires from IF tomorrow, she's done more for the form than I or 99% of you will ever manage.  It's up to us.  Where are we?

Some of us who are very, very good are writing games like the generally acknowledged best game of 2007: Lost Pig.  On the one hand, Lost Pig is nothing to disparage.  It's hilarious; it's great fun; it's honed and polished to the most beautiful shine.  Admiral Jota deserves tons of praise and respect for his creation.

Most gaming opens worlds for people. Interacting with characters and role-playing a career or life that they do not have in the real world allows people to imagine themselves in certain situations, or challenges the person to make certain decisions.  It is that aspect of gaming, along with the writing,  descriptions of scenes and the possibility of interacting with characters that make interactive fiction so special. As a blind person, most mainstream role-playing games are unplayable. Interactive fiction is then the bridge that allows me as a blind person, who also would like to participate in the joys of relaxing with a role-playing computer game, to step into an imaginary world.

As traditional news organizations face increasing pressure to cut back on investigative reporting and depend more heavily on celebrity and puff pieces (cheap to produce, attractive to advertisers, accessible to a mass audience), Dan Gillmor suggests that advocacy groups such as the ACLU have an opportunity to fill the gap.  If only they were fairer to the opposing view...

They're falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they've been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides' arguments, however weak. (That's sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

The malapropism: This venerable category of errors derives from the delicious and eponymous Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals of 1775. Mrs. Malaprop (from the French mal a propos) pretentiously and unknowingly substitutes the wrong word for a similar-sounding correct one in her pronouncements, such as an allegory on the banks of the Nile. Or, more comprehensively: If I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs! (apprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets).

The Spoonerism: The Rev. Archibald Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, has given his name to a tongue-twisted error in which portions of words are transposed in phrases to give new and incongruous meanings. May I sew you to a sheet? for show you to a seat and the toast To our queer old dean for dear old queen are representative examples. Though the Rev. Mr. Spooner was said to be given to this sort of thing, it appears that many Spoonerisms attributed to him are entirely apocryphal.

The mondegreen: In an 1954 essay Sylvia Wright gave this word its impetus by desribing how as a child she had understood a line in the ballad "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray," laid him on the green, as Lady Mondegreen. A mondegreen is a misunderstood rendering of the text of a songf or poem. The child's hearing the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear" as "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear" is a famous mondegreen. Rock music, given the roaring instrumentation and slack articulation of the singers, is fertile soil for mondegreens.

The eggcorn: The linguist Geoffrey Pullum has given us this term for an erroneous transformation of a stock expression into a new one that only appears to make sense. Free reign, hone in and baited breath* are typical examples. They appear to rise typically from misunderstandings of spoken English as it is translated into the written version.

The Cupertino: Technology has given us a new class of error identified at Language Log as the Cupertino: an error induced by careless use of electronic spell-checking -- a form of cooperation transmuted into Cupertino. The Sun once presented a notable example in an article referring to Kunta Kinte, the protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, as Chunter Knit. It should be superfluous to point out that only a fool sets a spell-check program to run automatically.

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love. --Carolyn Y. Johnson

Milton's poetry never lets you relax. Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended. So after rehearsing the story of Mulciber's leisurely fall from heaven "like a falling star," Milton's narrator says, "thus they relate, erring," with the harsh judgment of "erring" now attached to any reader who had been entranced by the "fable" put forth by the devils. ("Paradise Lost, I", 740-747).

B5. Web Pages and Web Logs

126. Web pages and Web logs (the online personal journals known as blogs) present imaginative opportunities for personal expression and exciting new journalism. When created by our staff or published on our Web sites, they also require cautions, magnified by the Web's unlimited reach.

127. Personal journals that appear on our official Web sites are subject to the newsroom's standards of fairness, taste and legal propriety. Nothing may be published under the name of our company or any of our units unless it has gone through an editing or moderating process.

128. If a staff member publishes a personal Web page or blog on a site outside our company's control, the staff member has a duty to make sure that the content is purely that: personal. Staff members who write blogs should generally avoid topics they cover professionally; failure to do so would invite a confusion of roles. No personal Web activity should imply the participation or endorsement of the Times Company or any of its units. No one may post text, audio or video created for a Times Company unit without obtaining appropriate permission.

129. Given the ease of Web searching, even a private journal by a staff member is likely to become associated in the audience's mind with the company's reputation. Thus blogs and Web pages created outside our facilities must nevertheless be temperate in tone, reflecting taste, decency and respect for the dignity and privacy of others. In such a forum, our staff members may chronicle their daily lives and may be irreverent, but should not defame or humiliate others. Their prose may be highly informal, even daring, but not shrill or intolerant. They may include photos or video but not offensive images. They may incorporate reflections on journalism, but they should not divulge private or confidential information obtained through their inside access to our newsroom or our Company.

130. Bloggers may write lively commentary on their preferences in food, music, sports or other avocations, but as journalists they must avoid taking stands on divisive public issues. A staff member's Web page that was outspoken on the abortion issue would violate our policy in exactly the same way as participation in a march or rally on the subject. A blog that takes a political stand is as far out of bounds as a letter to the editor supporting or opposing a candidate. The definition of a divisive public issue will vary from one community to another; in case of doubt, staff members should consult local newsroom management.

131. A staff member's private Web page or blog must be independently produced. It should be free of advertising or sponsorship support from individuals or organizations whose coverage the staff member is likely to provide, prepare or supervise during working hours. Care should be taken in linking to any subject matter that would be off limits on the Web page itself.

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

Berlin is home to the world's biggest chess boxing club with some 40 members and it is in an old freight station here that the two men settled the matter early yesterday.

The match began over a chess board set up on a low table in the middle of a boxing ring.

Stripped to the waist, wearing towels around their shoulders and headphones playing the lulling sound of a moving train to drown out the baying crowd, the men played for four minutes.

Then off came their reading glasses and on went the gloves and the mouthguards.

For three minutes they beat each other and then, when the bell went, the chess board was back in the ring and they picked up the gentlemanly game where they had left off.

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities--­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide--­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in--­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold them and they are soon caught in a sack. For every Minnesotan fighting, there are 6 Alabamans trying to kill him, sometimes from the distance of a handshake. The rebels are so thick around the 1st Minnesota that many Southerners are injured by friendly fire. The Minnesotans take cover behind trees and boulders as their world is reduced to smoke and screams, the ssszzz of bullets passing and the thock of bullets hitting home. Colvill is struck in the shoulder and foot. LTC Adams is hit six times. Maj. Downie is shot through both arms. Cpts. Muller and Periam, along with Lt. Farr, are all killed. Every officer is a casualty. The flag of the 1st Minnesota falls 5 times and is picked up 5 times. They fail to capture the enemy colors. They have stopped the charge, but they cannot retreat because they know that Hancock's implicit orders were to hold the rebels until he can patch the hole in the lines above them. So they stand and die.